Services: Retail spots open in fall, geared toward daily needs
San Franciscans returned Monday to the lush greenery of the Transbay transit center’s temporarily closed rooftop park. Soon, store owners hope they will visit again to buy coffee, snack on empanadas and work out — all part of an ambitious retail plan for a space that anchors the city’s fastgrowing highrise district south of Market.
Six foodfocused tenants and three service providers have committed to leases totaling more than half of the center’s 100,000 square feet of retail space, according to a Transbay Joint Powers Authority report. Officially called Salesforce Transit Center, the $2.2 billion project has 34 storefronts in its ground floor and second floor.
Food and drink tenants include two Philz Coffee shops, another location of Financial District restaurant Per Diem, Eddie Ricken
backer’s bar and restaurant, Venga Empanadas, Tycoon Thai and an outlet of Ohio restaurant chain Charleys Philly Steaks.
Service tenants include the gym Fitness SF, OnSite Dental and health care company Kaiser Permanente. Shops will start opening in the fall.
The Transbay center is the city’s secondlargest new retail project in years. The troubled 6x6 project in MidMarket is more than twice as big with 250,000 square feet of retail space, but still has no tenants after opening in 2016. Its MidMarket location and headwinds in the mall sector are cited as challenges.
The transit center opened last August and shut down in September for more than nine months after two cracked steel beams were discovered and repaired. Stores didn’t pay rent during that time, said Christine Falvey, a Transbay Authority spokeswoman. That cut significantly into revenue: Retailers are expected to pay $2.9 million in rent for the 20192020 fiscal year, according to the authority’s operating budget, down from a previous $5 million estimate.
For restaurant owner Pablo Romano of Venga Empanadas, the delay has been exasperating. He said he signed a 10year lease at the transit hub earlier this year and hopes to be up and running by October.
“It’s been frustrating but not financially,” he said. Venga, which sells Argentine-style empanadas as well as soups and salads, has two other locations.
Erika Elliott, a Colliers International broker who is leasing the center, said leasing talks and construction work continued during the closure.
“When things are shut down, people don’t see customers running around spending money. The feeling is less vibrant,” she said.
The center is targeting “daily needs” like food, coffee and fitness, she said. No retailer canceled a signed lease.
One thing that’s absent is clothing stores, a retail sector that’s been filled with recent bankruptcies.
“Do we have apparel? No,” she said. “It’s more about the experience than the gathering of goods.”
One draw for tenants serving alcohol is the center’s cheaper liquor license, which costs around $7,000, compared to around $250,000 for a typical license, she said.
The closure was a setback but the retail leasing activity is encouraging, said Andrew Robinson, executive director of the East Cut Community Benefit District, which provides funds for the majority of rooftop park operations.
“Certainly some momentum had to be lost,” he said. “We do feel with the transit center and park reopening, that excitement’s going to quickly come back.”
The center will also have temporary retail including a florist and shoe shiner when bus service returns at an undetermined date. Food trucks also operate outside.
Coffee fans are already patronizing other offerings in the area. A Starbucks is open in Salesforce Tower’s fifth floor, with a direct entrance onto Salesforce Park, the transit center’s rooftop green space that reopened on Monday.
The nearby 181 Fremont tower has Facebook offices and upperfloor condos, along
with a seventhfloor Andytown Coffee Roasters.
Andytown also has a direct entrance to the park and foot traffic has more than doubled as of Monday morning compared with before the reopening, said Lauren Crabbe, cofounder of the coffee roaster.
“It’s been a gamechanger today. We’ve seen more than double the amount of people we usually see,” she said. Previously, the only way to get to the shop was by elevator.
Andytown roasts specialty coffees with beans from areas including Ethiopia, Peru and Colombia. It has three locations in the Sunset. Crabbe said the abundance of other coffee options — just a walk across the park or a floor down in the transit center — isn’t a concern because they serve other tastes.
“I’m very much a believer that business brings more business,” Crabbe said. “I think Starbucks and us have different enough products that we’ll have different customers.”